aestheticles: n. The little-known source of aesthetic reactions. If your whole body feels like going into a fetal position or otherwise double over from the pain of experiencing something exceptionally ugly and inelegant, such as C++, it's because your aestheticles got creamed.

And as a result we find that object-oriented languages have succumbed to static thinkers who worship perfect planning over runtime adaptability, early decisions over late ones, and the wisdom of compilers over the cleverness of failure detection and repair.

Any comparison of hot JVM languages is likely to note that "Clojure is not object-oriented." This is true, but it may lead you to the wrong conclusions. It’s a little like saying that a rifle is not arrow-oriented.

Bigger is just something you have to live with in Java. Growth is a fact of life. Java is like a variant of the game of Tetris in which none of the pieces can fill gaps created by the other pieces, so all you can do is pile them up endlessly.

C++ is the dumbest language on earth, in the very real sense of being the least sentient. It doesn't know about itself. It is not introspective. Neither is C, but C isn't "Object-Oriented", and object orientation is in no small measure about making your programs know about themselves. Objects are actors. So OO languages need to have runtime reflection and typing. C++ doesn't, not really, not that you'd ever use.

I am reminded of Gregor Kiczales at ILC 2003 [the International Lisp Conference] displaying some AspectJ to a silent crowd, pausing, then plaintively adding, "When I show that to Java programmers they stand up and cheer."

I may be biased, but I tend to find a much lower tendency among female programmers to be dishonest about their skills, and thus do not say they know C++ when they are smart enough to realize that that would be a lie for all but perhaps 5 people on this planet.

I should not choose long, hard words just to make other persons think that I know a lot. I should try to make my thoughts clear; if they are clear and right, then other persons can judge my work as it ought to be judged.

I would compare the Smalltalk stuff that we did in the '70s with something like a Gothic cathedral. We had two ideas, really. One of them we got from Lisp: late binding. The other one was the idea of objects. Those gave us something a little bit like the arch, so we were able to make complex, seemingly large structures out of very little material, but I wouldn't put us much past the engineering of 1,000 years ago.

Just a gentle reminder that I took some pains at the last OOPSLA to try to remind everyone that Smalltalk is not only NOT its syntax or the class library, it is not even about classes. I'm sorry that I long ago coined the term "objects" for this topic because it gets many people to focus on the lesser idea.

The big idea is "messaging" -- that is what the kernal of Smalltalk/Squeak is all about (and it's source: something that was never quite completed in our Xerox PARC phase).

Lisp - the notion of writing your code directly in tree form - is an idea that’s discovered time and again. People have tried all sorts of crazy alternatives, writing code in XML or in opaque binary formats or using cumbersome code generators. But their artificial Byzantine empires always fall into disrepair or crush themselves into collapse while Lisp, the road that wanders through time, remains simple, elegant, and pure.

Lisp indeed leaves you with your own ideas and your own limitations. It doesn't pose any artificial restrictions on your programs that you have to work against, and it doesn't provide any "color by numbers" examples that make you feel like you have achieved something. Lisp requires you to be creative.

Lisp is the language of loveliness. With it a great programmer can make a beautiful, operating thing, a thing organically created and formed through the interaction of a programmer/artist and a medium of expression that happens to execute on a computer.

Meta means that you step back from your own place. What you used to do is now what you see. What you were is now what you act on. Verbs turn to nouns. What you used to think of as a pattern is now treated as a thing to put in the slot of an other pattern. A meta foo is a foo in whose slots you can put foos.

Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. Alan's breakthrough in object oriented programming, wasn't objects, it was the realizing that the Lisp metasystem was what we needed.

OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them.

Parentheses? What parentheses? I haven't noticed any parentheses since my first month of Lisp programming. I like to ask people who complain about parentheses in Lisp if they are bothered by all the spaces between words in a newspaper...

Rewarding incompetence and ignorance increases the number of incompetent programmers. Designing programming languages and tools so incompetent programmers can feel better about themselves is not the way to go.

So the problem is-I've said this about both Smalltalk and Lisp-they tend to eat their young. What I mean is that both Lisp and Smalltalk are really fabulous vehicles, because they have a meta-system. They have so many ways of dealing with problems that the early-binding languages don't have, that it's very, very difficult for people who like Lisp or Smalltalk to imagine anything else.

The one thing it [Lisp] has going against it is that it is not a crystallization of style. The people who use it must have a great deal of personal style themselves. But I think if you can have one language on your system, of the ones that have been around for a while, it should be Lisp.

These languages will never be mainstream, because the mainstream would never see the benefits they provide. The mainstream would kill themselves with such power. There's a reason the mainstream likes manifest typing, procedural programming, and cut and paste methodologies, quite simply, it's all they can handle.

We've always known that dynamic languages are a great way to create "little languages" for specific tasks. But we don't yet fully appreciate that all programming is a continuous process of language invention. And we don't (yet) evaluate programming-language productivity on those terms. .... We are linguistic animals endowed with a protean ability to generate language. Naturally we'll want that same generative power in our programming languages.